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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/41614
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Don’t worry about it. Race is a very minor consideration when it comes to characters. Focus on character traits, not skin colour.

If you offend someone because you do not clearly state that character X is white and therefore they can relate to them, those are the readers who would have complained because War & Peace was full of Russians and French. You do not want to pander to those.

As others have said, write what makes sense to your work. It is your world.

If you decide that Day and his dictator father are white and oppressing these mutants who are also _people of colour_ you might be making an unintended political statement. Of course, you could explain why the dictator of your country is white when the population is not.

What tools you use to understand your characters need never make it into the finished work. There are things I know about each of my characters that will never be stated in the book, but the knowledge colours my treatment of certain scenes and such details could be inferred by a discriminating reader.

In my current work, I have a character who is of Irish descent but was born and raised in Columbia. If readers choose to see her as a Latina who chose an Irish code name, so be it. As long as they are interested in her, I am pleased.

With most of my characters, I am silent on race. If a reader chooses to see themselves in that character, they are free to so do.

I do not see my character as you do. It was not until a cousin of mine who is much more visual wanted to know what actors they looked like that I gave it any thought. Who would I cast as my MC? That made me wonder what he looked like. Until that moment, I only knew his eye and hair colour.

If it works, don’t fix it.

Original score: 2